Up, Up, and Away!

Kevin Kelly's Vision of Screen Literacy

“We are people of the screen now.”Kevin Kelly, “Becoming Screen Literate,” The NY Times Magazine, 11/23/08

In the “Screen Issue” of The New York Times Magazine, Kevin Kelly creates a provocative vision of our future in video. “Becoming Screen Literate: How the Moving Image Is Upending the Printed Word,” offers a hymn to user-created videos. Like many techno-evangelists, however, Kelly begins with an interesting observation but then carries it too far.

Let’s start with the central argument: Screens are popping up everywhere and screen ubiquity is now inevitable. As screens proliferate and begin to dominate how we access information, we are fast moving from the era of language literacy—the ability to read and write—and toward an era of screen literacy, when literacy will mean the ability to parse and manipulate video, stringing together fragments from various online sources into new mashups in video form.

The Mashup as Work of Art

The Gutenberg era is clearly coming to an end. Kelly celebrates the rise of the videos you can see on YouTube and other sites. These are composite mashups, which take existing video material found on the Web and build a new work: “A typical creation might artfully combine the audio of a Budweiser ‘Wassup’ commercial with visuals from ‘The Simpsons’ (or ‘Teletubbies’ or ‘Lord of the Rings”).”

Kelly argues that the sheer number of user-created videos and the availability of easy-to-use video programs make it certain that screen fluency, with various tools to scan, search, index, edit, copy, and recombine images, will prevail. Yes, Hollywood will still make their custom-built elaborate films, but now everyone will be able to make mashup videos. “The bottom is where the action is,” Kelly reassures us, “and where screen literacy originates.”

Kelly foresees a time when creating video from existing digital material might become a “collective sport.” Films could be made, as “Speed Racer” was created earlier this year, from a million individual existing images, in effect mashed up from pre-existing parts. After all, he argues, isn’t this what writers do? According to Kelly, writers rearrange the words from an established vocabulary and “reassemble” them into articles, novels, and poems. “The joy is in recombining them,” he says. “Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared [words].”

The images are out there, and the tools are starting to become available. The tools for text literacy include mechanisms such as tables of content, indexes, abstracts, databases, and, more recently, search engines that search the Internet for information. Extending his analogy, Kelly explains the need for similar tools for video. “The holy grail of visuality is to search the library of all movies the way Google can search the Web. Everyone is waiting for a tool that would allow them to type key terms, say “bicycle + dog,” which would retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle.”

Essentially, the article posits, now that video is digital, anything will be possible, given the right tools. “We are people of the screen now. . . . Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network.” Alleluia, alleluia, amen.

Screens are indeed showing up everywhere and no doubt there are budding George Lucases and Steven Spielbergs out there mashing up video snippets, but is this going to fundamentally change our culture? Let’s start at the beginning and examine some of Kelly’s major points:

Screen ubiquity will completely change our culture by making user-created videos a major medium.

Not necessarily. Just because screens are everywhere and video mashups are becoming easy to make does not mean that everyone is going to spend a lot of time making and watching mashups. It’s more likely that these amateurish (and frequently immature) videos are a passing fad, popular primarily with the under-25 set. It’s part of life as a performance as Lee Siegel has written in Against the Machine. Screens do dominate our written communications (email), they’re fast taking over newspapers as a form of news delivery, but email still uses text without video and text still predominates on Internet news sites as well.

Mashups of Budweiser ads + “The Simpsons” = Art

Surely Kevin Kelly doesn’t mean to suggest that a mashup of beer ads and the Simpsons is the next art form? Perhaps this is an example of things happening at the bottom, as he says.

Writing is a process of rearranging words on the page.

This makes writing sound more like how you might cobble together a new jalopy by gleaning spare parts from a junk heap, not how one communicates through writing! And surely this is not the way writers write, unless they are aiming for a pastiche. One problem with digital media is that people tend to focus on the mechanics of manipulation rather than the organic, intuitive, and always mysterious creative act. Whether fiction or nonfiction, art or information, writers use language to communicate thoughts and ideas. Certainly William Faulkner did not write nor has Toni Morrison written by sitting down to rearrange existing words on a page.

“Everyone” is waiting for the Google-like search tool for video.

Well, maybe not everyone.

We are people of the screen.

We are? Are we becoming one with the screen? Or are we a herd moving senselessly from screen to screen? Maybe someday each of us will have a video cam inserted in our heads so that we can record our dreams and then mash them up as the Daily Me in Facebook.

Because video is now digitized, it can be manipulated, broken up into small clips, and recombined to create new and exciting film. Digital media are essentially liquid.

This is reminiscent of Kelly’s assertion in an earlier article about Google’s plan to scan all books. There he suggested that once all books are digital we will have the liquid version. We can then unravel books into single pages, or even snippets, and then string them together again to collect, say, all the information on World War Two, or all French cooking recipes. It’s unclear how useful these new “books” would be. After all, taken from context, the interpretation of history by one historian, say from Russia, and another one, say from Britain, might be just plain confusing, and the whole project would be incredibly redundant. Ditto for combining all the recipes on earth for beef bourguignon or crème brǔlée. Essentially such agglomerations would create the quandary we already experience today: too much information, lifted from its original context, in random order. It’s hard to find what you want, even with Almighty Google to help.

Kelly, like other techno-evangelists, seems to feel the need for a peroration—a broad swath of visionary rhetoric to conclude his look into the future, when what we really need to do is calm down and think about the future creatively but with a little less zeal.

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) used mixed-media found objects and arranged them in boxes to visualize poetic associations he found between things, people, events, and ideas. Have a look at one of his most famous works. Does it qualify as a mashup?